Site Search Navigation

Site Navigation

Site Mobile Navigation

On Art, Action and Meaning

By Arthur C. Danto June 3, 2010 3:02 pmJune 3, 2010 3:02 pm

The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless.

In a comment on Arthur C. Danto’s post, “Sitting With Marina,” a reader, TM Shier, wrote: “This article is a disappointment. It is descriptive, not explanatory. It answers none of the really interesting questions raised.” Those questions, as posed by the reader, and Mr. Danto’s answers, are below:

Q.Is performance art really art at all?

A. We must determine what art is or how it is defined before answering this question. The oldest theory of art in the West is to be found in Plato, in Book X of “The Republic.” There, Socrates defines art as imitation. He then declares that it is very easy to get perfect imitations — by means of mirrors. His intent is to show that art belongs to the domain of reflections, shadows, illusions, dreams. He proceeds to map the universe in terms of three degrees of reality. The highest reality is found in the domain of what he calls “ideas,” the forms of things. Ideas are grasped by the mind. The next degree of reality is possessed by ordinary objects, the kind carpenters make. The artist only know how ordinary objects look, as rendered in painting or drawings. The carpenter’s knowledge is higher than the artist’s: his beds, for example, hold the sleeping body or, more strenuously, bodies locked in love. The highest knowledge is possessed by those who grasp the idea of the bed, understanding how it supports the body. The lowest knowledge, if it is knowledge at all, is the artist’s ability to draw pictures of beds. They only show appearances.

This famous design of the universe and its degrees of reality was clearly constructed to put art in its place — the domain of illusions, shadows, dreams. The artist is cognitively useless. And yet the Greeks wanted to build their curriculum on mere poetry – on “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey”! I treat this in my essay “The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art. ”

It explains why philosophers tend to have little use for art. Several of Plato’s dialogues stress the inferiority of art — for example “Ion,” “The Statesman” and “The Laws.” The political message of “The Republic” is that philosophers, at home in the realm of ideas, should be kings. Artists don’t even belong in the Republic!

Meanwhile, the mimetic theory, as it is called, had a certain power. Aristotle, in his “Poetics,” characterizes plays and epics as imitations of actions, such as the death of Hektor. Ion the rhapsode tells stories from the epics, moving his audience to tears. There are no records of ancient performances, which might have been ordeals, demonstrating the performer’s stamina or strength.

But a performance is not the imitation of an action, but the action itself. It is art and reality in one.

Related

In the 1960s, a group of philosophers, inspired by Wittgenstein, argued that art was indefineable: so many things are classified as art that the most one could hope for is what Wittgenstein called a “family resemblance.” Yet not having a definition does not stand in the way of our picking out the art works from a pile of assorted things. A definition will make us none the wiser. Unfortunately, the philosophers who subscribed to this view were out of touch with the avant garde. Between 1913 and 1917, Duchamp presented a number of readymades, most famously his “Fountain,” a toilet bowl. In 1964, Andy Warhol exhibited wooden facsimiles of shipping cartons. A work of art and a mere shipping carton can look exactly alike. What explains the difference? What is the difference between sitting down with someone in a performance and merely sitting down with someone? The work of art has meaning; it is about something. And it embodies that meaning.

Many people thought that Marina Abramovic’s act of sitting across from them was a case of the emperor’s new clothes. But for most who sat with her, the act was fraught with meaning. It was in a sense a sacrifice on the artist’s part, an ordeal, an immense favor conferred on those who sat with her.

Q.Was the event staged by Marina a “work” or a “text” in hermeneutic terms?
A. I would say yes. Who sits and who remains standing refers to an ordering of rank. Professors hold chairs, the body is the seat of the soul, the chairman or chairwoman runs the meeting. Think of the Last Supper, think of Christ at Emmaeus. To sit together is to share one another’s presence. Think of the title of Marina’s show, “The Artist is Present.” And what presence means. The sitters are honored to be in the presence of the artist. It is a ritual moment, and understood as such by their own ordeal of waiting. The woman who sat for the entire period (seven hours) tried to make the presence hers. The next day Marina was present but the woman who sought her presence was gone. Marina’s presence was a treasure that could only be conferred. These are some of the hermeneutical aspects that the artist understood, and sitters mainly acknowledged. Think of all the photographs that shows tears in their eyes! People will discuss this event for years. It was a moment of spiritual exchange. How many of those do we have in a life?

Q.Can the event really be “re-performed?” Can the event be “read” and “interpreted?”

A. My response to the previous question consists of readings and interpretations. It is an acknowledgment of the spiritual dimension of being present. Could Marina do it again? She has a shamanic gift. Not every artist could be present and she has been, or be present again. That is entirely different from the presence of a painting. What distinguishes performance art from the rest of art is the presence of the artist’s body. That comes and goes with the artist. Subtract the artist’s body from the art and the sacredness that the performance is capable of is stultified.
Q.What possible meaning can an event staged in person 3,000 miles away have to me?

A. That depends on you. If the event calls you, you will be there if you can. Art is something that demands presence. That calls for pilgrimage. How many visitors came for Marina because they felt they were called from afar? That they needed to be there? It is not tourism, strictly speaking. It is being in the presence of something. Not touched by that thing physically, but being touched, as being touched by a poem. The spiritual wiring of the human soul remains to be diagrammed. That is what art is for. In making herself present, Marina creates an intimacy that needs nothing beyond itself to be momentous.

Arthur C. Danto is Johnsonian Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Columbia University, and was the art critic for The Nation from 1984 to 2009. He is the author of several books on analytical philosophy and the philosophy of art; and winner of the the National Book Critics Prize for Criticism in 1990, as well as Le Prix Philosophie for “The Madonna of the Future.”

What's Next

The Stone features the writing of contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless. The series moderator is Simon Critchley. He teaches philosophy at The New School for Social Research in New York. To contact the editors of The Stone, send an e-mail to opinionator@nytimes.com. Please include “The Stone” in the subject field.